1. Field
Embodiments of the invention relate to the field of manipulating data for presentation by a computer prior to use with a specific display system; and more specifically, to using more than one graphics processor to manipulate the data.
2. Background
Electronic devices such as personal computers, digital assistants, media players, wireless communication devices, and the like typically include a visual display unit to provide visual displays to a user. The visual displays are typically generated by application programs being executed by a processing unit included in the electronic device. Several application programs may be executed concurrently and they may share the visual display unit by using only portions of the display unit to present their visual displays and/or by “stacking” their visual displays so that the user can bring the display for any of the applications to the top of the stack to be viewed in its entirety.
The electronic device will typically include an operating system, which is a program executed by the processing unit, to provide an abstract interface to the hardware of the electronic device for the application programs. This allows specific programming requirements of the hardware to be encapsulated in the operating system and make the application programs independent of the specific hardware implementation. The operating system also manages the sharing of the hardware by the multiple applications.
The operating system will typically include support for providing visual displays on visual display units. The provided visual display support may include facilities for merging or compositing graphic elements to create a display layer and manipulating one or more display layers to create a visual display using a hierarchical layer abstraction. Supported graphic manipulations may include rotating, moving, and resizing graphic elements. Support may also be provided for adjusting the color and transparency of graphic elements. Animation of any or all of these supported transformations may also be provided.
It will be appreciated that supporting these graphic manipulations can be computationally intensive, particularly for high resolution displays. The electronic device may support multiple displays, which further increase the computational requirements. For example, an electronic device may include a first display that is included in the electronic device and an interface that allows a second display to be connected to the electronic device to provide additional space for visual displays.
It would be desirable to provide a computational architecture that supports extensive graphic manipulations for visual displays on multiple visual display units.